The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

'Occupy' with Chinese characteristics

My most recent piece for Asia Times. This article can be reposted if Asia Times Online is acknowledged and a link is provided to AT.

One of life's many ironies is that the
Occupy model of disobedient activism has racked up
more successes in the land ruled by that poster
child of remorseless authoritarianism, the Chinese
Communist Party, than it has in the United States.

US Occupy activists were quickly and
efficiently shoveled into the "dirty dreamy
disorderly hippie radical" box by political,
economic, and media elites eager to make the world
safe for income inequality. For their part, the
activists - very much like the 1989 protesters in
China - were all too eager to occupy the morally
(and, up to a point, physically) safer high ground
of non-violent civil disobedience.

Passive
petitioning resulted in little more than littered, smelly encampments in public
parks and a fatal loss of interest and support
from the US public.

Things are different
in China.

Popular occupation of government
offices in the Guangdong village of Wukan in
response to the real-estate depredations of the
local powerbrokers was a thrilling demonstration
of people power.

The China-occupy model
spread with successful actions against the
township government of Shifang in Sichuan province
over a copper smelting project and, most recently,
in the seaside Jiangsu town of Qidong, where
locals stormed the township government building to
stop a wastewater pipeline.

A most interesting and
important element of the Shifang and Qidong
actions is the prominence of a confrontational
vanguard of young people - high school students
and twenty-somethings (collectively known as
"after 80s" and "after 90s" for their birth years)
who appear quite happy to mix it up violently with
the cops and cadres.

It appears that a new generation is less
interested in recapitulating the experience of
1989 and the Tiananmen Square protests than
redefining it, or even discarding it.

That
creates a new challenge for foreign observers of
China, especially those who continue to view
Chinese dissidents primarily through the prism of
1989, with a vision of nobly (and Nobel-y)
passively suffering, democracy worshipping, and
US-adoring dissidents that sometimes verges on
patronizing condescension.

China's
"post-1980s" and "post-1990s" generations grew up
after the Communist Party settled on the formula
of modulated political repression and explosive
economic growth enshrined in the term "stability."

That's a dispensation that many members of
the "post-1980s" and "post-1990s" generations have
no share in formulating, and perhaps see
little need to respect, as they navigate their way
through the demoralizing and degrading
post-socialist robber barony that is China today.

In Shifang, activists among a crowd of
several thousand attempted to bumrush the
municipal government building, but were repelled
in a police action that turned into something of a
police riot. The result was dozens of serious
injuries inflicted on agitators, demonstrators,
and hapless bystanders alike, and a marked swing
in national popular sympathy toward the
demonstrators.

Qidong provided an
alternate vision of how Shifang might have turned
out.

Asahi Shimbun's Atsushi Okudera
reported from Qidong:

About 5,000 people filled the
streets in central Qidong before 6 a.m., when
the rally began. The protesters began chanting,
"Protect the environment" against the dangers
posed by a plan for a drainage pipeline into
local waters.

But less than 10 minutes
later, the crowd broke through a row of police
officers blocking the main street and started
marching toward the city government building 1
kilometer away. The demonstrators became louder
after they reached the building.

Several
minutes later, they pulled down the steel gate
and swarmed over the premises.

About
2,000 occupied the inner courtyard, several
thousand on the street in front of the city
government building and many others in nearby
structures overlooking the building, bringing
the total of protesters to more than 10,000. [1]

The cops did not make a concerted
effort to protect the municipal building (although
they did engage in some arresting and headcracking
- as well as pummeling Atsushi Okuderu and seizing
his camera - later on).

Demonstrators
rushed in and trashed several offices, flinging
objects and documents out the windows. Their
trophies of anti-authoritarian triumph - a
publicly displayed stash of liquor and condoms -
created less of an impression than photos of
overturned police cars and the spectacle of the
party secretary of Qidong, Sun Jianhua, smiling
sheepishly after demonstrators tried to strip him
in the street and forcibly clothe him in
pro-environmentalist t-shirt. [2]

"Rampaging young people" evokes the trauma
of the Cultural Revolution for the older,
better-educated, and more thoughtful Chinese
citizen.

For Western observers, the analog
is the Arab Spring, an outpouring of youthful
anger and a yearning for dignity and agency that
counts respect for liberal democracy and free
enterprise - and the elites that profit from them
- a distant second.

The incident in Qidong
offers an insight into the dynamics of political
activism in China - and also hints that the
Communist Party hasn't quite figured out what to
do about it.

The wastewater pipeline had
attracted unfavorable attention in Qidong since it
was announced in 2009.

The pipeline is a
core component of a massive paper project in the
special economic zone of Nantong City (the
political jurisdiction encompassing Qidong) near
Shanghai. Instead of dumping the effluent into the
nearby Yangtze River, the decision was made to
build a 112-kilometer pipeline to dump the
wastewater into the Yellow Sea at Qidong's ocean
port of Lusi.

Lusi is one of China's four
major fishing ports and is near an important
fishing ground. With the construction of the
bridge-and-tunnel project from Shanghai across
Chongming Island to the Yangtze's north shore, the
Qidong coast is now only an hours' drive from
Shanghai and is turning into something like
China's Cape Cod - a beachside getaway (with
traffic jams) for affluent city dwellers yearning
for the bracing sea air and the famous local
clams.

Environmental degradation is
emphatically not on the menu, and it appears that
the pipeline project inspired a significant amount
of local unease.

It was promised that the
pipeline would deliver wastewater of the modern,
well-mannered sort from a greenfield plant with
world-class environmental controls - the pipeline
was called "The project for expelling water that
has met applicable standards into the sea" - but
locals were understandably skeptical.

The
pulp plant going up alongside the paper mill would
be enormous - at a capacity of 700,000 tonnes per
year. The amount of wastewater sloshed into the
pipeline would be even more enormous - dozens of
tonnes of water for every tonne of pulp produced,
for a daily flow of 150,000 tonnes.

If the
effluent was so safe, people asked, why not dump
it into the Yangtze instead of spending tens of
millions of yuan to pipe it to the coast at
Qidong? (It appears that the pipeline is meant to
bypass a key reservoir in the Shanghai drinking
water system on the Yangtze downstream of
Nantong.)

Public suspicion was exacerbated
by the concern that other Nantong industries might
eventually piggyback their waste on the pipeline,
dumping who-knows-what - perhaps after a festival
of corrupt permitting - into Qidong's local
waters.

Government assurances apparently
did little to mollify citizens of Qidong who were
uneasy with the project, or discourage activists
looking to push the issue. Opposition in Qidong
was undoubtedly energized by the example of
Shifang.

Activism was couched in the politically
privileged and crowd pleasing term of NIMBY (Not
In My Back Yard) environmental activism. Activists
used social media and carefully prepared
educational and propaganda materials to organize a
mass demonstration. Again, high school students
were in the vanguard.

The local government
refused a permit for the demonstration but quickly
announced that the project was "on hold". This
standard leaf from the dissent-sidelining playbook
of both authoritarian regimes and liberal
democracies was brushed aside by the
demonstrators.

The demonstration went on
as planned on July 28 before the municipal government
offices, and then morphed into confrontation and
occupation as some activists went in and trashed
the place, followed by hundreds of demonstrators
who subsequently filled the balconies surrounding
the structure.

Given the abjectly
conciliatory performance of the government, party,
and security officials in Qidong during the
ruckus, one can infer that the occupation was
planned ahead of time by at least some activists,
and was not an outburst of spontaneous indignation
against unendurable establishment excesses or
insolence during the demonstrations.

The
Nantong City government followed the precedent of
the Shifang government and capitulated promptly.
The announcement posted on the Qidong municipal
website on July 28, the same day as the
demonstrations, stated:

After careful considerations, the
Nantong City Government has decided to halt the
implementation of the Nantong Large-Scale
Project for Expelling Standards-Meeting Water
into the Sea in Qidong. [3]

An
electronic billboard in Qidong displayed a less
nuanced, more crowd-pleasing message on the same
day, even as demonstrators were gathered in the
city center:

After careful consideration, the
Nantong City Government has decided to cancel
this project for ever.

However, the
people power message has been muddied by a number
of factors.

First of all, there was a
suspicion that the government's low-key response
did not represent an outbreak of democratic
reasonableness. Perhaps risk-averse government
officials were in a state of temporary politically
induced paralysis brought on by the impending
leadership transition in the central government
and the perceived need not to make any
controversial moves until it was clear what
leaders and what policies would have the upper
hand.

Once clear guidance and support from
above materializes, in other words, offended city
governments and their manhandled mayors will
revert to standard operating procedure and strike
back instead of turning the other cheek.

Secondly, it appears that, as a matter of
tactics by both the government and the protesters,
the Qidong action has become confounded with the
current trend in anti-Japanese nationalism
percolating through China.

Oji Paper
Company of Japan is the hapless owner of the pulp
and paper mega-plant in Nantong, with a total
planned investment of US$2 billion. Oji Nantong is
the main projected user of the pipeline (which was
to be funded and constructed by the Chinese
government).

The billion-dollar paper mill
is already in operation using imported pulp; the
pulp mill would consume Brazilian eucalyptus chips
and Yangtze River water and provide pulp to the
paper mill as well as the lion's share of effluent
to the pipeline.

The Nantong plant is a
world-scale plant (an Asian consortium has
constructed a plant similar in size and operating
philosophy - but no public rumpus - at the
Shandong port city of Rizhao) and represents Oji's
big bet on the China market (including the
rocketing demand for high-end toilet tissue) and
its own future. The cost savings provided by an
integrated pulp and paper operation are an
important factor in the profitability and perhaps
even the viability of the Nantong project.

In an apparent effort to deflect
accusations of anti-government and anti-party
activism, the demonstrators framed their protests
in terms of blocking Oji's plans to sully the
pristine coastal waters of Qidong.

For its
part, the state media was also happy to
characterize the protests as "anti-Oji", gliding
past the awkward part of the story where hundreds
of demonstrators occupied and trashed a local
government headquarters in a calculated expression
of anti-regime anger.

The decision to hang
the Qidong albatross around Japan's neck was
undoubtedly made easier by the prevailing
atmosphere of Sino-Japanese tension brought about
by renewed confrontation over the
Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands.

In the echo
chamber of China's Internet, crude anti-Japanese
sentiments became something that both pro- and
anti-government posters could all agree on, and
calls went out for a boycott of Oji's popular
Nepia toilet paper.

After the furor dies
down, Nantong City may very well try to
resuscitate the pipeline project in a different
form. The official announcement that
implementation "in Qidong" would be terminated
leaves open the possibility that the government
will find a new way and/or new place to make it
work.

The central government, mindful of
the damage done to the PRC's reputation as an
investment destination if a billion-dollar
foreign-funded project can be undone in one
weekend by a few thousand demonstrators, will
probably also search for a way to protect Oji's
interests in Nantong.

Judging by its July
30 press release, Oji is anxiously hopeful:

The Nantong municipal government has
indicated that the current plan to build a
pipeline to the sea via Qidong may be
permanently shelved. We are investigating the
impact this could have on our project to build a
paper plant in the province and will announce
our conclusions as soon as we reach them.
[4]

However, the lethal combination of
Japanese investment, environmental fears, and the
precedent of government capitulation would seem to
provide a gigantic and irresistible target for
political activists if there was an attempt to
revive the pipeline project in any form.

For the Chinese government, in the wake of
Shifang and Qidong, the key issue is not how to
placate victims of government misbehavior and
environmental abuse; it is how to handle local
unrest when it involves projects that haven't even
started yet, and is driven by educated, alienated,
and ever more proficient, confident, and militant
young activists who are always looking for ways to
push the regime's buttons and are never content to
take "Yes" for an answer.

If similar local
protests with student/citizen synergies continue
to ignite, and Occupy China shows signs of
becoming a nationwide trend, the Chinese Communist
Party will be forced to contemplate some
interesting and unpleasant alternatives.

And it may not have the luxury of waiting
until after the leadership transition to make some
decisions.